I stopped blaming other people for my problems

Last night I had a great time chatting with Rax King about her new book Sloppy Or: Doing It All Wrong for a lovely crowd at the Brookline Booksmith in Brookline, MA. I hadn't been over that way in years but it was a very nostalgic evening for Michelle and I walking around the neighborhood we spent so much time in when we were young. Our first date was actually at the Coolidge Corner theater to see Todd Solondz' Storytelling which was not a particularly good movie for a first date and one we only chose because we heard Belle & Sebastian did the soundtrack. Whoops. I haven't checked in on Selma Blair in a while come to think of it but I'm sure her politics are good.

Here's an edited transcript of my talk with Rax. And by edited I mean shorter. Transcribing is the worst fucking thing in the world so if you see any typos no you didn't.

Paid subscribers can listen to a longer audio version of it down below complete with a few more anecdotes and a bunch of nice questions from the audience and find out how well all of my bits went over. (Killed it dude.)

Here's 25% off a year of Hell World.

For other recent-ish author interviews check out this one I did with Niko Stratis about her book The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman or this one with John Oakes about The Fast: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Promise of Doing Without.

Before we get to Rax here's a quick one from my new book We Had It Coming which you can pre-order now for 20% off with the code WEHADITCOMING.

In related news.

Alright here's the talk. In case you've missed them she's written for Hell World a bunch of times including about Garth Hudson of The Band, her favorite Lana Del Rey songs, the film Anora, wanting and sobriety, expensive wedding traditions, the film Priscilla, another Lana one about Born to Die, the band Creed, and her favorite Weezer songs.

People get anxious about the concept of a recovery memoir for some reason. It's a fraught thing. Is this one and if not do you recoil from that description of it? 

I do not recoil from the description of a recovery memoir, but I can tell you that my publishers did a little bit. So legally speaking this is a book about bad habits, this is not a recovery memoir. My publisher wouldn't allow that to happen, so we're talking about all kinds of scumbag behavior in here, and it's not all, specifically, addiction. I kind of set out to write a real recovery memoir, and it did start feeling like I was boxing myself into a corner, and I just... There's only so many times you can write the essay of like, and then I started drinking, and then it got bad, and then I got better, and then I got into heroin, and then it got bad, and then I got better... That doesn't keep being interesting. So it's probably for the best that it's not a straightforward recovery memoir. 

I was actually a little surprised. I thought there would be more of that. It's really not about, I mean, it is about addiction in a way, but there's so much more going on. It doesn't fit into that traditional mold.

You've done a good amount of press for the book lately, and I gather you've had a couple of bad experiences. I know you've talked about a few of them on socials, but what are some of the dumbest questions you've gotten. Just so I don't also ask them here.

I love that you're giving me the chance to just be a gossipy little bitch tonight, because I'm ready. Okay, so I will tell y'all, and we'll just keep it between the 75 of us, or however many of you there are. There was a lady who I agreed to go on her podcast, which I hadn't heard of. That doesn't mean anything. She was much older, like, 65ish, and the first question out of her mouth, we met on Zoom, she was looking at me, and I had just come from the gym, and I was wearing a t-shirt, and she was like, oh, you're pretty covered up today. Because I was on your Instagram. All of your pictures are wearing a low-cut dress, something skin-tight, and I'm just like, is this a question? Like, what? So don't ask me that. 

I'm not the stupidest man in the world. I'm not asking you about that. 

And it went on in that fashion on that podcast for kind of a while. Like she just was interrogating me about my sexual choices and other such things. How much money did I pull in as a stripper? Which is none of your beeswax. None of your beeswax on all accounts, ma'am. 

And also, weirdly, I feel like people keep trying to get your real name out there for some reason. I didn't even know it wasn't your real name. 

Yeah, sometimes people don't, and I'm always very flattered that it sounds real, because people have been calling me Rax since I was like 18. It stuck, and so that's semi-real, and then I was like, I don't know, I'm the king! Now I'm saddled with that shit too. But yeah it's this thing people do with strippers, and with anyone who writes under a pseudonym. Elena Ferrante, and with, you know, Dril. 

That's not her real name?

It's not. And it's not Drils' real name either. 

I gotta read more books. You're also getting a ton of great positive reviews. How do those go down for you? Are you the type of person who thinks this person who likes me is obviously stupid? Or do you take praise well? That's a thing.

No, I'm laughing, because I'm very much like, if somebody immediately likes me, and makes it obvious, I'm just like, okay, all right friend, what's your game? What are you cooking up that you have to pretend to like me? And if somebody is nasty to me, I'm like, that person has great judgment, because they're being mean to me, or they're writing, you know, a nasty review of my work. Those are the people I trust. And anyone who's friendly to me or speaks well of my work, I'm just like, something is wrong with you. Why would you ever be nice to me? Don't you know?

I do. I do. Does writing come easy or hard to you, and whether or not it does, did you have to relearn how to write after getting sober? Did you used to do something I do, which is I'll write something drunk, or aftter a few drinks, and then edit it sober the next day. Where in that spectrum do you traditionally fall? 

Before I quit drinking, I now have three years and change sober time... Feel so free to applaud me at any time! But before I got sober my writing practice was that I would do a bunch of shots in a row of bourbon. I liked bourbon. And I would always keep an eight ball on me and I'd do a bunch of lines. Because if you're too drunk you can't see straight, you gotta sharpen up. And I’d keep titrating back and forth, and then at some point I'd hit an equilibrium and I feel like, okay, let's make the magic happen. Then I would write just unreadable garbage. And you're a part of the equation where you edit the unreadable garbage when you're sober. It was actually really hard because I was either hungover, and I didn't want to be looking at my computer screen, much less the terrible words that I produced on it, or I would be actually sober and I would have to really come face to face with how bad my drafts were. So it's much better now, but I definitely thought, like, oh I'm screwed. I don't have my magic juice anymore that makes me think of stuff. What am I gonna do? I didn't realize how much easier it would be.

I can imagine. How good is your memory then because there's a lot of detailed descriptions of events from when you were a child in here. I have a terrible memory, which is a very bad quality for a writer. But did you have to dig deep to remember some of these scenes from elementary school and the various assholes you encountered then and up through your twenties? 

Early childhood stuff was fairly easy for me to remember for whatever reason. It probably helps that I was not drinking yet. There's a lot of pretty direct quotations and whatnot from those years. That might be why they were so sticky for me. But with other stuff I don't have a good memory. There are entire months, probably entire years, that are just not available to me immediately. So I had to do something I recommend to all my memoir students. I had to make some uncomfortable phone calls to people who probably thought they were never going to hear from me again. I would run past them my version of events, and more often than not they'd be like, no, that is ass backwards wrong. You remembered that so incorrectly, and here's all the horrible stuff you actually did in that scenario. I don't know that I agree that I was unilaterally awful in the way that various exes would say, but it was really helpful for me to hear the other side of situations that I had never heard the other side of. If you're not writing memoir, how often do you seek out people that you've wronged to be like how badly did I wrong you? Probably never! You never want to have that conversation. And it was really helpful for me, and generative for me, and it seems to have been healing for a number of heterosexual men of the Washington D.C. metropolitan area, so, you know, everybody wins. 

I'm going to read a passage here. Because we're in the Boston area I'm going to call you out on this one. Although it doesn't seem like the type of crowd that would be too offended by it. 

“Not to brag or anything, but I breezed through addition and subtraction back in elementary school until fourth grade or so. I was like the stupidly named Will Hunting in the unconsciously, stupidly named Good Will Hunting.” 

You can't say that shit here in Boston! 

I stand by it, sir. 

It is pretty stupid. 

I will fight any Bostonian person who wants to fight me about that. 

Alright we’ll meet outside after.

Luke and I are going to fight after. 

Do you think you're fucking better than me? 

There's only one answer to that question. I can't be like, no. 

What, if anything, do you find in common from your experience working in strip clubs or restaurants to the journalism and publishing world, and which one has shadier characters? 

Between strip clubs and restaurants and publishing? Publishing's got some people, they're a specific kind of shady I can't stand, where they won't even cop to acting shady. If you're in a strip club and someone's withholding money from you or whatever, there's a pretty basic script for how that's supposed to go, which is I cuss you out and you either pony up your money or you don't. But I know how that's supposed to go. In publishing, people send you baffling emails that have all kinds of subtext that I have no sense of how to interpret. I don't know what subtext is, I don't know why anyone would be just following up with me. It's a fool's errand. I don't know about shadier, but it's a kind of shady that I really cannot metabolize. I cannot do professional shit to save my life. You can't do that kind of thing either I don’t think. 

No. I'm surprised I made it this far because in a restaurant or, you know, in certain circumstances, if someone owes you money it’s like give me my fucking money. 

Right. 

If you do that in publishing or journalism... Supposedly, you're not supposed to do that. You're supposed to be like, oh, I’m sorry, I'll ask again in six months, please, for my money. 

You're supposed to wait like 30 days and then 60 days and then you just go creeping up to someone's email like can I have my money? And then maybe they will pay it to you. 

Right, right. It's a terrible business! There's something we have in common, which a lot of people do, of course, there was this knowledge from a young age that there was something inside of us, which is this likelihood for addiction and alcoholism. We were born with sort of an inheritance type of thing. You write:

“I realized for the first time that not every person in the world was an alcoholic. The liquor wasn't bad, we were bad.”

Meaning your family. Has your thinking on that changed at all since you wrote that a couple more years in?

I grew up in a sober house with both my parents in recovery from the time I was born and so that was always the dynamic with drugs and alcohol. It was this scary thing. You know how when you're really little you think your dad could kick anyone's ass and then you grow up and you're like no that was just some guy? I never thought my dad could kick anyone's ass because he was scared of drugs and liquor. As was my mom. And so it became this really powerful absence in our house. It was this thing you didn't talk about. It was like fucking Voldemort or something. I think that for all that I'm really glad to have grown up with sober parents. They taught me so much about sobriety and addiction. But that attitude has for sure stuck with me where alcohol is this evil force. I have so many friends who aren't alcoholics, and even so there's this little guy in my head who's like, should you keep drinking? Even when I see people drinking normally. I can't stop seeing it as the enemy, as opposed to just something I can't do. And that doesn't really have any moral weight to it on its own. It's been really hard to break out of. I don't think that because my entire family and I are a bunch of addicts, I don't think we're bad people, but I think we have a specific batch of character deficiencies that a lot of people... they just have other ones. I don't know that I like these ones all that much. I would love to trade.

Another thing we have in common is a dead addict father who sort of looms over a lot of what we write about everything. There's a chapter in there, maybe you were like eight or ten, where you find out he had a bunch of ex-wives that you didn't know about. 

“The more plausible explanation was that my father had never lost the slippery addict's habit of not-quite-lying, while still, you know, lying.” 

You also write that you still have the impulse to lie even if it's over nothing. Like a stupid little lie. Is that something that you still feel and what do you reckon that is about? 

Dude, I love lying so much. I told like six lies since I'd started talking just now. If there are people in this crowd who are in recovery they will probably find relatable this instinct to lie all the time about stuff that doesn't matter. My husband, like a week ago, I was home, and I had been out for a couple of hours and he was like, oh, what'd you get up to? I had been to the bakery and I ate a little treat and read my book and came home. And I began lying to him about where I'd been to make it sound like I'd been doing something virtuous. And thank god, I'm not a drunk anymore, so about halfway through, I did stop myself and I was like, I don't even know why I'm lying to you right now. Here's where I actually was. It didn't matter, like it was just over nothing. And there's this distinct lowlife side of me that threatens to take over a lot and wants to... That's the part of me that wants to lie about nothing constantly. And that's the part of me that, if I feel angry, like I did so many times on the train today, if she had been allowed to take over, it would have been just tantrum city. I would have gotten banned from Amtrak. She starts fights with people and she forgets that she's like 5'2" and probably shouldn't be starting fights with people. She drinks too much and she's like constantly whispering to me, like the little cartoon devil on the shoulder. 

I think it was probably Anthony Bourdain who said something similar about his little guy, and his upshot was I have to spend my entire life trying to outsmart that side of me. I feel resentful sometimes that all the shit I have to do that normal people don't have to do just to prevent myself from giving into the urge to sprawl out on the sofa all day with a bong in one hand and a box of Cheez-Its in the other and just bail on my entire everything.

I eat a lot of Cheez-Its though. 

I eat so many of them though. They're so good. 

Extra toasty! It's coincidental, I have a piece in my new book about people holding on to their old things, holding on to them for too long. And you hold on to a lot of your father's things. I don't have any of that. I do have a few things from my grandmother. I feel like if I throw them away that it almost would be like desecrating her grave in a way. Do you feel that same way about your own shit or is it just your dad's shit? Do you hold on to your own detritus and the shit that you pick up over the years?

I’ve been known to hang on to empty Arizona iced tea cans. I love to have them grow mold on my desk. I don’t know. I don't like to do this. I hold on to my dad's stuff because of that feeling you described. It’s like, he's dead, and this is what I have left. And it unfortunately comes in the form of a bunch of little crystal babies and creepy shit like that. Stuff I don't like and don't want in my house. But it's his stuff, you know? What am I gonna do? He's dead and I just have this attachment in my head between him and his stuff. It’s like if I start throwing his stuff out, I'm throwing him out.

That thought appears in an essay in here about the show Alone. It's like a survivalist reality show. Each person gets only ten items from a list of survivalist gear. That's all they can bring into the woods with them. I got really into Alone a couple years after my dad went, because I think I just was so astonished that people could make, you know, people make lives out there with ten items. And I felt so empty and bereft still, and I got a house full of my dad's shit. Like there was this weird opposite effect happening there. I don't know. I still watch Alone, and I'm still obsessed with it for basically the same reason, and I still have thrown nothing away. And so we're right back at square one again. 

Like I said you've been getting a lot of press, your picture in the newspaper and stuff. Do you worry if you get too popular it might be jeopardizing your shoplifting career? 

I've already been worrying about that. Oh my God. So the Washington Post did a profile of me. The essence of it was I walked around D.C. with one of their journalists. At one point she wanted to go to Brandy Melville, where I shoplift from. There's a whole essay about it in here. And she was like, okay, so it's going to be you and the photographer, the photographer's assistant, a big old camera, this lighting rig. And I'm just like, I am never going to be able to shoplift from this place again! This is the most seen I have ever been in my life. And it's in my little shoplifting cave. I worry about that all the time. 

That fits the profile of a Washington Post nerd reporter. How did your time on the Neopets boards, when you were young, prepare you for the era of Twitter and Bluesky and such? 

Oh god. There's an essay in here about being on the Neopets forums. You're just reminding me of all the deeply embarrassing stuff I used to do, like in bullet points. 

You put it all in the book!

I know, but it's like 200 pages kind of spread out, and this is just like question after question. I do think though, that those forums, it wasn't just Neopets, you know, there used to be a whole ecosystem of user-only forums, and they really do not differ meaningfully to me from social media as it is now. Then and now the game was to get attention, and it was this really condensed form of attention that you could really only get either by being really funny or really obnoxious. And I'd like to think I’m pretty funny, but the obnoxious route is way faster and more rewarding if all you're trying to do is, like, press the attention button over and over again. And so I think that in a very real way being a little mean girl on Neopets forums fifteen years ago… If I wanted to be a mean girl, I'd still know how to do it on Twitter. I don't think I'm really into that kind of stuff, though. 

No I wouldn't say that. You wrote about coming of age during the 2000's sort of Maxim era, and it being a kind of reaction to some of the gains feminism had made in previous decades. And as the passage goes:

“In the patriarchal culture of the fifties, American men treated their wives like children. They doled out allowances and disciplined lapses in behavior. But in the aughts, thwarted by the victories of women’s lib, the men became children in their own right, prodding at women, trying to get a rise out of them. Once the rise was gotten, they basked in the he-­ man woman-­ hater’s Nuremberg defense: I was only joking! Lighten up!”

How would you say we're doing on that stuff right now? 

Not great! The early 2000's, that specific kind of frat boy misogyny, it's the kind that raised me. I grew up steeped in it and I associate it with dumb as dog shit magazines like Maxim. It's not even Playboy. Playboy had real articles and shit. Maxim was just like 10 hot babes! Girls Gone Wild was becoming a thing then too. It was just really dumbed down. And I think I referenced it in the book, there was a movie, What Women Want, and the plot of the movie was Mel Gibson is a misogynist who can read women's thoughts. That was considered like a fun romantic comedy in that era. And all of that stuff is coming back again. Like really stupid, dumbed down porn is coming back, and Mel Gibson, against all odds, is making a comeback. Nobody wanted to hire me to write an essay about that. I got like 10,000 words of Mel Gibson in me. You talk about how fashion tends to be on this twenty year trend cycle, and I think misogyny, it seems to be very much the same. In the 70's you had women's lib, in the 80's you get American Psycho type scumbag behavior. In the 90's and then in the aughts, the cycle repeats and we're back in a Mel Gibson type downturn right now. 

It's a great time to be a piece of shit. 

Yeah!

You write about a point after your first book Tacky had come out, and a lot of people would consider you a big success now. Your book is out and it's doing well. People like it. And then you go back to working in a restaurant. Which is something that I did, because as we mentioned this business is shitty. So even when I was writing for all these fancy magazines, I was still waiting tables until I was like 37 years old or something. How did you navigate that? That type of shame is stupid, and I know it is, but did you feel it as well? There's a point in the book where someone comes into the restaurant and they say, oh, I have your book with me and then you're working at the restaurant. How did you feel about that? 

I will preface this by saying there is no shame whatsoever in restaurant work. 

Not at all!

We've both done so, so much of it in our lives. And that shame you talk about wasn't about doing this job that I had done my whole life. It was about feeling like I had done something I was really proud of and it hadn't changed my conditions hardly at all. I hadn't made a bunch of money off of it... I did some events with some beautiful people who were buying my book and it didn't really change anything. And that was the shame to me. I was just feeling like I had done this thing I had wanted to do my whole life and I did it and I'm still having to like grovel for a job in a restaurant that I'm not even good at.

I'm so bad at restaurant work you guys. A bad memory I was talking about earlier, and I'm not friendly. Just, it was a mess. It wasn't just about being at this job. I'd be there doing a bad job, frankly. And just feeling like, really? Is this it? I'm a writer and this is my life? I'm still like running mozzarella sticks to people who do not need to be eating mozzarella sticks. It does not matter if this job gets done and I'm still doing it. And that's the money maker. And my career that I actually care about is not. 

I'm ashamed of being a writer too. Especially when people ask you what do you do? And you're like... uh... I'm a writer. But then you have to like… do you get that? And then all of a sudden you find yourself defensive. Now you're auditioning for the role of writer in this person's mind. Do you have to be like, oh no, I have a book out. It’s like why am I trying to impress this person? 

Yeah, I feel like I'm trying to prove it sometimes. Like they give a shit. Nobody cares that I'm a writer. I care so much. Nobody else cares. My husband works heavy construction. So we spend a lot of social time with guys from that world who could not give two shits about the latest media dust-up or whatever. What's going on in publishing…. And I shouldn't care either. And so in that way I do think the shame is kind of good. Because I think that a lot of people who are writers, it's really easy to enter this mode of, like, all your friends are also writers. You only hang out with book people. You get together, you talk about books, and then you start writing books about talking about books. It regresses and regresses. And you forget how to be a person. And that actually is the other reason I got that restaurant job. I probably could have made that money aggressively freelancing. But I wanted to be a person. I wanted to be a person with a job. 

You write about your enjoyment of spending money, another thing you got from your father. What's the stupidest thing you spent money on lately? 

Oh, the stupidest thing I've spent money on lately? I'm not going to tell y'all how much it costs because it's unconscionable, but I did get a professional facial done about a week before my book launch date. Because, you know, I'm a writer, so apparently it's really important that I have good skin. It did nothing. It was an hour of doing nothing and afterwards I paid my little amount, on my credit card obviously, because I don't have real money, and I just felt so dumb. I was walking around like I really spent that much money to have some liquids rubbed into my face? Which I can do at home. I know how to rub liquids on my face. Why? And that feeling, the post-spending hangover, is the worst thing in the world. It's worse than a real hangover because your life is worse in a way you can count. 

When you're hungover from drugs or alcohol, your body eventually reverts back to normal, but when you spend money on something stupid, the money's still gone. 

It's still gone. 

The bank account doesn't repair itself. 

The bank does not accept my excuse that I have a money problem. They don't put the money back just because I have a money problem. 

Okay last one. You wrote these essays two or three years ago, some of them one or two. Are you a different person in any way that seems notable than you were when you wrote this book? 

The first essay that I started writing in this book, it's called Proud Alcoholic Stock, and I wrote it like a week after I quit drinking. And you can tell, when you read it, that I'm so mad. I'm so cranky. And you can just feel me wanting a drink. Then the last essay in this book is I think the most recent one that I wrote. It was a couple years later and it's about the movie The Wolf of Wall Street. You can kind of track the changes of my story, in my spirit, from that first essay to the last one, just by seeing how much less pissed off I am. I stopped blaming other people for problems that are my problems. All that stuff you can kind of track. Now, at this point, maybe a year after the last of this work was written and done, I'm fixed! I'm normal now.

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